1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the fields of data processing and medical technology and in particular concerns a method for controlling peripheral apparatuses in a medical technology environment; correspondingly fashioned medical technology apparatuses and peripheral apparatuses, and a system that is fashioned for communication with the participating apparatuses.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In large medical systems it is known that the respective large apparatuses (for example, computed tomography, apparatuses, angiography apparatuses, ultrasound apparatuses, positron emission tomography apparatuses, single photon emission computed tomography apparatuses etc.) are not used as a single unit, but rather frequently are operated together with other (often smaller) apparatuses. This modular design entails some advantages including more flexible usage possibilities for the respective large system. These smaller apparatuses frequently also are designated as peripheral apparatuses, since they are arranged in the periphery around the respective large apparatus. For example, peripheral apparatuses can be injectors, respiration apparatuses, EKG monitors, gradient amplifiers or detection apparatuses for respiration gating.
A specific protocol or communication interface is necessary for the operation of the entire system and with regard to communication between the individual modules.
A CANopen interface that is based on the CAN standard and is a layer 7 communication protocol is known in particular from the field of automation technology.
In principle different basic services are defined in the CANopen standard. Among other things, these are: Request, Indication, Response and Communication. Moreover, different communication objects are defined such as, for example, a service object, a process data object and a network management object. Moreover, an object registry is provided in the standard, in which object registry all relevant data of a CANopen apparatus are stored in a tabular data structure. The object registry includes all apparatus parameters and all current process data. In principle all communication objects and all user objects are centralized in the object registry. The object registry is typically sub-divided into different regions. General specifications about the apparatus (such as, for example, an apparatus identification (ID), a manufacturer name and further communication parameters) are stored in a first region. Specific apparatus functionalities are described in a further section. The entries of the object registry are typically identifiable or accessible via a 16-bit index. In principle, relevant parameters of the apparatus (such as, for example, input and output signals, apparatus parameters, apparatus function or other parameters) are made accessible for further instances via the entries in the object registry.
If the CANopen standard were now applied to medical technology without modification, a problem would be the lack of flexibility in the feature-dependent control of the peripheral apparatuses, since previously a host-based software module had to be used in order to read out or make accessible hardware information (such as, for example, the vendor ID, the serial number and the device name) relevant for the apparatus control. A “host-based software module” means a software module that is associated with the bus master. If an arbitrary peripheral apparatus were attempted to be specifically and selectively controlled by an external instance via the CANopen interface, in the prior art this was previously possible only in a very limited manner via the bus master, if at all. Moreover, a more flexible control possibility for the respective peripheral apparatus was also not provided. For example, it has not been possible to adaptively control specific features of the peripheral apparatus and thus to activate or to deactivate a peripheral apparatus depending on the application case. It has also not been possible to set the scope in which a particular peripheral apparatus should be used (for example only for a limited number of test purposes, or only in a specific host system).